In a free society laws against hate speech, as opposed to laws against incitement to violence, should be repealed. This is another recent piece of news from Barcelona, from a site called Gaytway.

Authorities in the Barcelona suburb of Sant Boi de Llobregat have launched a campaign aimed at raising awareness about the town’s sexual diversity featuring a series of questions on its municipal buses such as “Meat or fish?”, “Sweet or savoury?” and “Blue or pink?”

The Sant Boi’s initiative coincides with the outrage in Madrid which we reported earlier this month. There a bus chartered by bigoted Catholic group Hazte Oír plastered with the transphobic message “Boys have penises, girls have vulvas. Don’t let them fool you. If you’re born a man, you’re a man. If you’re a woman, you will continue to be so” was paraded through the streets of the Spanish capital until it was quickly impounded in a car park by the council.

Attitudes towards sexual morality have changed remarkably among Catholics in the last thirty or forty years.

I remember in the late 1980s reading, in the liberal Catholic (or anti-Catholic) magazine The Tablet, a letter from Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, who later became my friend and mentor. He was commenting on an article by a priest, who condemned Catholics who imagined AIDS was a punishment from God. Monsignor Gilbey's letter, written of course from the Travellers' Club where he lived, consisted of one sentence and pointed out that the Catechism states that the sin of Sodom is one of the four sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.

I was godless in those days but whooped with delight when I read it. The letter was elegant and conclusive. Argument over.I imagined the article, which I hadn't seen, was a reflection of the strange reluctance of many Christians to acknowledge that diseases and natural calamities are acts of God. Now I think it might have been that or it might have been changing attitudes to traditional moral teaching even among priests. It was in the age of Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, which now seems a long time ago.

4 comments:

You see this is why I really don't care what happens to countries like Sweden, Spain, France or Britain. They have not only freely chosen national suicide, they have freely chosen to wallow in mindless emotional claptrap and complete moral degeneracy. These countries surely deserve to suffer the same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah.

They have not freely chosen anything. Even in the US, the birthplace of modern democracy, I saw a staggering statistic of laws and regulations adopted via executive order or bureaucratic action, versus those which underwent the legislative process and were voted upon. For every law that went through Congress (parliament), there were hundreds of laws, regulations, and rules that were just decreed by the powers that be.

"What makes this case truly remarkable is the way in which it is being reported. As comedically incongruous statements go, "man gives birth" is right up there with flying pigs, man bites dog and World War II bomber found on Moon. Up until very recently, certainly no more than two or three years ago, such ludicrousness would have been the preserve of surrealist comedy or the Sunday Sport and one would have expected the British tabloid press to report a story of this nature with a number of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, innuendos and knowing references to its obvious ridiculousness. However, in the current year, mainstream British newspapers are reporting that a man has given birth without the slightest hint of comedy or satire. It is now a grave matter of the utmost seriousness. Our (((Marxist overlords))) demand it. "